The myriad of communication services, ranging from basic telephone calls to text messaging as well as emails and instant messaging, has offered tremendous flexibility and ease for users to stay in constant contact. Mobile technology has further fuel the ability to reach a broad base of consumers nearly at all times. Unfortunately, unwanted communications have plagued the effectiveness of these communication options. For example, with emails, spamming has resulted in an enormous amount of wasted network resources and needless expenditure of users' time and energy in filtering out such nuisance communications. At best, the problem is addressed at the receiving or user end with expensive spam filters; in such a scenario, network bandwidth has already been consumed before the problem is identified. In the telephony arena, the blocking of calls permits a subscriber to automatically filter out unwanted voice calls, for example, from organizations and businesses as well as individuals. Such blocking can readily be circumvented by the caller utilizing a different telephone number. Moreover, this mechanism has no analog in the other communication services.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that effectively and efficiently enables the blocking of unwanted communications across multiple communication services.